HOW TO MEDITATE—IT'S SIMPLER THAN YOU THINK

'Meditation is not divorced from our daily living. In the very understanding of our daily living meditation is necessary. That is, to attend completely to what we are doing. When you talk to somebody, the way you walk, the way you think, what you think, to give your attention to that. That is part of meditation.'—J. Krishnamurti.

Here are the names of a couple of people of yesteryear. There will be more than a few readers who will have heard of them, but there will ever so many people who will not have heard of them at all, which is a great pity. The names of the two people are Annie Besant and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Both were incredible women.

Annie Besant

During her lifetime Annie Besant was many things—minister’s wife, atheist, secularist, reformer, Fabian socialist, advocate of women’s rights and socio-political change, author, Theosophist, Co-Mason, orientalist and leader of the movement for Indian home rule. Madame Blavatsky (‘HPB’) was quite a woman as well. She was a Russian occultist, spiritual philosopher and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Besant met HPB in or around 1890—HPB died the very next year—and in August 1890 HPB moved in to Besant’s house in St John’s Wood, London. Anyway, here’s a little anecdote Mrs Besant would tell. She once asked HPB, ‘How shall I meditate?’ HPB is said to have replied, ‘Stick your stamps on straight, my dear.’

Now, for the benefit of those who haven’t posted a letter—remember them?—in some time, or have never posted a letter, HPB is referring to licking (yes, licking) a postage stamp and then neatly but firmly affixing the stamp to the top right hand corner of an envelope. Hence, ‘Stick your stamps on straight.’ Of course, HPB is using an analogy. What she is saying is that, in order to meditate, you must take care to ensure that you perform your daily tasks, no matter how seemingly unimportant or trivial, with proper attention to detail and the effort to do it right.

H P Blavatsky

Note Mrs Besant’s question—‘How shall I meditate?’ She was asking for a method or technique. I hate the words ‘method’ and ‘technique’ as well as the 'how' word. I really do. My use of the word 'how' in the title to this post, implying the supposed need for a method or technique in order to achieve the sought-after end, is intentionally provocative, not to mention a bit mischievous. 

There’s a Zen story that goes like this. A disciple says to the master, ‘I have been four months with you, and you have still given me no method or technique.’ The master says, ‘A method? What on earth would you want a method for?’ The disciple says, ‘To attain inner freedom.’ The master roars with laughter, and then says, ‘You need great skill indeed to set yourself free by means of the trap called a method.’ Yes, I do have a real aversion to all so-called ‘methods’, ‘systems’ and ‘techniques.’ Don’t ask, ‘how’. Just do it! (I think that's not just a slogan but a trademark as well.) True meditation is a choiceless awareness applied it to one’s whole day, indeed one’s whole life. The philosopher and authority on Zen and all things magical and mystical, Alan Watts wrote that meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment’.

Annie Besant 'first day cover'.
Indian Posts & Telegraphs. October 1, 1963.

That, my friends, is what mindfulness is all about—living from moment to moment with awareness and being fully present during each immediate moment. True meditation occurs when there is a directness and an immediacy about your experience of life. All so-called methods, techniques and systems are an artificial construct—a barrier—to your moment-to-moment experience of life. Thousands of people spend a small fortune on courses, lessons and tuition on how to meditate. They recite mantras, affix their eyes upon an object, go into a trance-like state, and so on. The Indian spiritual teacher, international speaker and author Jiddu Krishnamurti was dismissive of all forms of meditation—except one. This is what he had to say about a commonly practised form of concentration meditation known as mantra meditation:

The other method [mantra meditation] gives you a certain word and tells you that if you go on repeating it you will have some extraordinary transcendental experience. This is sheer nonsense. It is a form of self-hypnosis. By repeating Amen or Om or Coca-Cola indefinitely you will obviously have-a certain experience because by repetition the mind becomes quiet. It is a well known phenomenon which has been practised for thousands of years in India---Mantra Yoga it is called. By repetition you can induce the mind to be gentle and soft but it is still a petty, shoddy, little mind. You might as well put a piece of stick you have picked up in the garden on the mantelpiece and give it a flower every day. In a month you will be worshipping it and not to put a flower in front of it will become a sin.

So, what, then, is true meditation? Krishnamurti went on to say:

Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; meditation is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased. Meditation is not control of thought, for when thought is controlled it breeds conflict in the mind, but when you understand the structure and origin of thought, which we have already been into, then thought will not interfere. That very understanding of the structure of thinking is its own discipline which is meditation.

Meditation, which Krishnamurti saw as a lifelong inquiry into what it means to be truly present and aware, occurs when you live in the action of the present moment, as opposed to the so-called present moment itself, for as soon as you say 'the present moment' you are in the past, you are involved in memory, and thus not living in the present moment. One more thing. You can only be said to be living in the present when your mind is free from all ideas of ‘self’. When you have the idea of ‘self’ (that is, of ‘I’ and ‘me’) you are living either in the past or in the future. 

‘Stick your stamps on right, my dear.’ Attend to the small, ordinary things of life with an ‘astonishingly alert mind’. Yes, meditation is in the direct and immediate living of your daily life, from one moment to the next.

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A POWERFUL PRAYER FOR OUR TIMES

The word ‘prayer’ troubles me a bit. I neither believe nor disbelieve in God. The belief-disbelief spectrum forms no part of my worldview or mindset, so even agnosticism is not an option for me. Besides, the traditional concept of God is contradictory, and I reject, as totally untenable, all notions of there being some all-powerful Creator to whom we can talk and who supposedly listens to, and will answer, our prayers. So, not surprisingly, I reject all forms of theistic, petitionary prayer.

However, there are many forms of prayer including affirmations of various kinds. We all pray, in our own way--even the atheist. In the words of an old hymn, ‘Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed.’ Thus, if you really want good health for yourself or some other person, or world peace, that is your prayer.

Does prayer work? Well, if sincere, a prayer can change the pray-er, and if he or she changes for the better, change may occur elsewhere as well. It all begins with the individual.

Here’s a prayer of sorts that was written by Dr Annie Besant [pictured above right] in 1923. I have made very slight changes to the original wording in the interests of gender inclusiveness:

O hidden Life, vibrant in every atom;
O hidden Light, shining in every creature;

O hidden Love, embracing all in Oneness;

May all who feel themselves as one with Thee,

Know they are therefore one with every other.

What powerful words!

We start with ‘life’--the fact of existence itself. Life is everywhere. It is omnipresent. In a very profound sense, life is omnipresence itself. Is it ‘hidden’? What is hidden about life? Well, we do not really see life itself. What we see is the out-picturing—the outpouring—of life. Life takes shape in innumerable forms. What we see are living things living out their livingness from one moment to the next. However, the essence of life—the very ground of being itself—is invisible to the eye. The dynamic, creative, inexhaustible and ineffable life-principle animates and sustains all living things—including you and me—but it cannot be seen. Yet it is ‘vibrant in every atom’.

And this word ‘Light’. When life becomes visible, in the form of innumerable living things living out their livingness, it is right to describe it as ‘light’. What is hidden about light? Well, as with the word life, the real light cannot be seen. It is in the nature of pure consciousness itself. Consciousness is non-physical, immaterial, and spiritual. A spiritual substance is something which, although real, is not perceptible by the senses. We only know 'it' by its effects. We cannot see electricity, but we see the light emanating from the light bulb. This inner light shines in every creature, including you and me, and it radiates outwards in a visible manner.

‘Love’. What is love but the givingness of life to itself so as to give rise to more life. The self-givingness of life. All around us we see the effects of the self-givingness of life in action, but the self-givingness itself is invisible to the eye--hence, once again, the use of the word 'hidden'. We see the phenomenon at work everywhere, whether it is in our garden or in the maternity ward of a hospital. This love does indeed embrace all in oneness. I am not advocating monism or pantheism. When I say that life is one, I am trying to say a couple of things. First, a single logic applies to all things and how they are related to other things. Secondly, all things exist on the same order or level of reality, and on the same ‘plane’ of observability. Call it the ‘interconnectedness of all life’ or, if you like, ‘InterBeing.’ The latter wonderful term comes from the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh [pictured above left]. I love that word ‘Interbeing.’

The bottom line is this. There is only one life manifesting itself in all things and as all things. The one is constantly becoming or giving birth to the many, but the one is inexhaustible. It is both manifest and unmanifest. Visible and invisible. Yet it embraces all multiplicity in oneness. In the words of Alan Watts, 'Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of Nature, a unique action of the total Universe.' And not just every individual, but every thing in existence.

The ‘Thee’ referred to in the invocation is not in the nature of a personal God. Annie Besant certainly did not believe in a God of that kind. She rejected all notions of an anthropomorphic God. And so do I. ‘Thee’ is not something or someone to be petitioned in the hope that He/She/It will answer our prayers. However, if you chose to believe in such a God, that is your business. The ‘Thee’ referred to in the invocation is the ‘Hidden Life’, the ‘Hidden Light’, and the ‘Hidden Love’. Those three things are a triplicity of sorts—different words for the same ‘thing’. The ‘thing’—actually, it is not a thing at all as we ordinarily understand that word—is the livingness, consciousness and self-givingness of life. When we come to feel—note that word ‘feel’—ourselves as one with that dynamic, creative life principle, in time we come to ‘know’—this is no intellectual knowing—that we are therefore ‘one with every other’. 

This ‘feeling’ is no warm and fuzzy thing. The word ‘feel’, as opposed to ‘think’, is used to denote a choiceless awareness of what is. There is no judgment, analysis or interpretation. Just choicless awareness. It’s the same with that word ‘know’. As I just said, it is not a matter on book knowledge or reasoned analysis. This knowledge is transrational. Not irrational, but transrational. As we read in The Voice of the Silence, ‘The mind is the great slayer of the Real.’ There is a place for the use of reason in our lives—a very great place—but the use of reason can never bring us to an understanding (again, not an intellectual thing) of what is truly ‘real’.

We live in a very troubled world. Has it ever been any different? We see politicians—well, some of them, at least, who are very much in the news at the present time—who seek to divide and pit one group of persons against another. That is not the way to world peace and harmony. It never was the way. I see plenty of division and conflict in our world but I also see plenty of evidence of an ever-growing group of people who, recognizing their common humanity with all other people, are working for the good of all and for the very survival of our damaged planet. They are the ones who rail against bigotry, racism, sexism and all other forms of discrimination. They are the ones who think deeply before following their nation’s call to take up arms against other peoples of the world. They are the ones who believe that climate change is real—which it damn well is—and who are advocating for climate change action at all levels. They are the ones for work for justice and equality for all, including refugees and all displaced and homeless persons. They know the truth of Dr Besant's prayer, even if they have never heard of her or the prayer the subject of this post.

Yes, these are the people who, often without any connection to formal religion of any kind, are ‘praying’ this prayer. They are praying in the only way that really matters—with their lives.

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